Moral Panics and Video Games

Moral Panics and Video Games Stephen Kline Simon Fraser University Vancouver, BC Moral Panic and Academic Discourse As Joe Kincheloe (1997) recently wrote, students of the emerging “postmodern childhood cannot escape the influence of the postmodern condition with its electronic media saturation”. In our academic circles, we are familiar with the long debate about the consequences of growing ‘media saturation’. Those of us who write about the children’s media do tend to fall into one of two camps—the moralizers and the liberators. Both camps speak about and on behalf of children’s culture: but do so from very different points of view. The moralizers see the media saturation as a problem because it is associated with the declining educational and moral standards. Children need to be protected from exploitation in the new media environments in the same way that 19th Century advocates protected children from abuses in factories and the family they argue. Alarmist voices proclaim a ‘crisis’ of postmodern childhood pointing to a moral decline, the rise of violence and degradation of cultural quality issuing consequential calls to curb the growing freedom that children’s TV producers enjoy. Perhaps Postman’s (1982) lament for the dissolution of ‘literate childhood’ is the best example of this alarmist position. Postman (1993) reiterated this argument about computer technology, which is according to him: “breaking a four-hundred year old truce between gregariousness and openness fostered by orality and the introspection and isolation fostered by the printed word”. He goes on to say: “Stated in the most dramatic terms, the accusation can be made that the uncontrolled growth of technology destroys the vital sources of our humanity. It creates a culture without a moral foundation. It undermines certain mental processes and social relations that make human life worth living…. When institutions are threatened, a culture finds itself in crisis” (1993: xiii). Liberators have argued that media critics feed this moral panic about new media and children and impose their own postdated values onto a cultural change, which is itself, progressive. The liberators advocate a more hands off approach to children’s culture and media industries. They want adults to lighten up a bit, preferring to grant to children’s cultural industries more autonomy in serving their child audiences free from the invasive interference of the moralizers. Liberators adopt a laissez faire attitude sometimes championing postwar American attitudes to socialization as they encourage children be freer to explore their world from their own position. However ribald and aggressive is at least more in keeping with their own values and needs. Liberators thus dismiss the moralizers ‘alarmism’ as just a recurring “moral panic” grounded in either zealous rectitude or bourgeois guilt. They scoff at the prior generations of moralizers who have sought to protect children from the evil influences of idleness, comics, or video nasties and write articles urging parents to accept the values and aesthetics of an expanding domain of postmodern media (Cumberback, 1993). It is the paternalism of traditional cultural values, they argue, which perpetuates a limp and sanitized children’s media, and which doesn’t respect children’ genuine quest for more varied and less conventional forms of re-creation and amusement. If nothing else as Drotner (1992) says, these recurring panics about media and the culture remind us that our ideas about children’s culture remain a contentious and politicized zone - media are a contested means of “social regulation”. This is because as Drotner observes: “Children and young people are prime objects of media panics not merely because they are often media pioneers; not merely because they challenge social and cultural power relations, nor because they symbolise ideological rifts. They are panic targets just as much because they inevitably represent experiences and emotions that are irrevocably lost to adults.” (1992: 59). Enter the kids’ media zone warily and self reflexively she notes. With Drotner I believe that both the attitudes towards our children’s media that underwrites moral panic and the cultural dynamic itself is a serious topic that requires dissection. Indeed it is impossible to study of cultural industries without recognizing the contested politics of children’s culture, which animates these debates in the postmodern era. Moral Panic and Media Markets In my work on children’s TV I noted that the politics of children’s television changed when the regulatory structures for US children’s television advertising were discarded and the world of children’s television was dramatically changed. Because children (under 12 years) at least were regarded as ‘vulnerable’ consumers, and incapable of formulating rational choice, most countries had protected them from the persuasive force of television marketing. In Canada for example, there was a self-regulatory system in place, and in Quebec an outright ban on advertising to children. In America, the TV industry was engaged in a long fight between policy makers protecting kids (FTC and FCC) and the children’s goods marketers who agitated to be allowed to market their goods (mostly snacks, soft drinks, toys and cereals) directly to children in the most effective way possible. Out of the Garden (1993) focuses on toy marketers who in the wake of deregulation, became the most and dynamic children’s advertisers of the 1980’s and pioneers of synergistic marketing strategies. In that book I detailed the new thinking that underwrites the targeting of children by the toy companies as they gradually shifted over to cross marketing strategies in which the ads become the front end of saturation campaigns, which flood multiple media channels to optimize exposure to their superhero, fashion and plush toy characters. And as direct to children’s toy advertising expenditures grew, so too marketing focused on children has matured and expanded into a very complex synergistic communication practice focusing on ‘character toys’ and cross marketing opportunism. Children’s media became a more hotly contested zone of postmodern culture, as parents resisted the growing influence of children’s marketers on their children’s lives. Successive generations of young boys were inducted into the joys of fantasy play by He- Man, G.I. Joe, Ninja Turtles and Power Rangers. And children’s animated TV veered in the direction of war and aggression. It was the emergence of the action hero warrior character that most agitated parents and renewed critics concerns about media saturation—although perhaps for different reasons than the earlier taste panics of the “vast wasteland” debates. In 1986-87 Hasbro launched a series called the In-Humanoids with an accompanying set of action figures. The series had combined the horror and action hero genres to provide a slightly different and more daring back-story to that season’s new show. This new programme was reasonably popular with young boys; yet those that watched it began waking up with nightmares, and when their parents went to their rooms they found the boys dreams were populated with characters and scenes from the Inhumanoids. A number of mothers actually called up their local stations, in sufficient enough numbers that the message got through to syndicates that there was a problem with this programme. It was withdrawn. I point out that this minor revolt against a disturbing programme although a byproduct of the organized action by activist campaigners (ACT) was not directly mobilized by it. The withdrawing of Inhumanoids was a grass root uprising comprised mainly of concerned moms mostly that experienced the effects of TV within their lives. My own entrée into these debates began as Star Wars, GI Joe and Inhumanoids invaded my own living room and disturbed the sleep of my own son. It seems that even in a free enterprise age, parents remained concerned about the changes taking place in television programming and its effects on their children’s fantasy life and play. Indeed in Canada, a grass roots movement against violence started 1989 by the mass murder of university women by a man fascinated by Rambo gained force through the 1990’s as incidents in the playground with children kicking and hurting each other with Ninja Turtle sticks and Power Ranger kicks. Surveys revealed that 90% of Canadian parents expressed strong concerns about reducing violence in children’s media and limiting the commercialization and advertising, a clear sign even to the Conservative governments of the 1990’s that there was a need to do something. Deregulation of TV was a political act whose implications for children’s culture became the rallying point of those who struggled against commercial exploitation of children—and the growing role that marketing to children plays in shaping the world’s media systems. The new critics and advocates (CMA/CME) re-focused their arguments away from the question of quality towards the biases of commercialization of media. A particular point of contention involved the imitative modeling of violent behaviour by very young children of the action warrior cartoons, which were most popular with the under 7’s — because they were deemed to be most vulnerable. The advocates have been remarkably successful in achieving the mandatory v-chip and the revisions to the Children’s Television Act (USA) because of this growing weight of public opinion (Stanger and Grindina, 1999). Some liberators point out how well organized the anti-TV advocates have become noting that these restrictive policies go against the grain of evidence that children in reality are no more violent today than twenty years ago. But even if they are right, this doesn’t mean we can dismiss the mobilization of public concern around media issues. The phenomenon of moral panic is itself of interest precisely because it is not just about differences in academic positions but because the issues still have enough resonance with the public to mobilize action.

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